+ Demand reconstruction technology aggregates and manages consumer demand and home generation at scale to smooth the demand profile and reduce demand at peak times.

If you’ve seen the video of Elon Musk's launch of Power Wall then you’ll be inspired by his vision. The battery itself looks beautiful, reminiscent of the slick style we’re used to seeing with Apple products. It’s the perfect complement to his ground-breaking Tesla car.

A domestic battery is also an important first step in something called demand reconstruction. This automatically changes the profile of demand a home places on the electricity grid, without consumers having to do anything or change their behaviour, such as using appliances at different times of day.

Arup is a shareholder in Hidden Layer Systems, a joint venture with Nick McMahon, which is working to explore demand reconstruction. The system we’re developing will intelligently integrate battery storage, local renewable generation and controllable loads at the meter.

The technology is designed to optimise time-of-use-tariffs and renewable generation for consumers. This means you can use electricity from the grid when it’s cheapest and get the most value from any power you generate yourself from sources such as rooftop solar panels.

The demand reconstruction technology also aggregates and manages consumer demand and home generation at scale to smooth the demand profile and reduce demand at peak times.

If rolled out at scale, our technology could mean we need less capacity to meet daily demand so we would need fewer new power stations. This has significant implications for power-hungry developing economies.

Energy storage seems to be the Holy Grail of the power industry. As a child I visited the pumped storage scheme at Ffestiniog in North Wales, where cheaper overnight electricity is used to pump water up to a top reservoir. The power station could deliver 360MW just 60 seconds after it was switched on.

It seemed such an amazing feat of technology - the dawn of a new, hi-tech era. So why has it taken 50 years for the next game-changing development? Whatever the reasons, it seems there is at last something to get excited about.

So what uses can you see for this sort of technology? Will it change the way we design and power buildings and public transport systems? How will all this affect electricity generation and distribution? And what are the hurdles and how can they be overcome?

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Comments /

Alec Milton

The idea of using domestic batteries is attractive which is why many organisations are working on it, but the problem has two significant barriers, battery technology and who pays.

I imagine that many more of us would be driving electric cars if the batteries were cheap and provided a suitable range, but they remain expensive, don’t provide enough range and have a limited life.

If these problems were solved, every parked electric car becomes a potential high capacity store for excess energy. You don’t need the consumer to go and buy a battery pack to bolt to the garage wall as they would already have one parked in their drive, most of the time at least.

Assuming that large capacity batteries remain expensive for the time being though, where is the incentive for the consumer to buy them? Without the electricity suppliers making it both easy and commercially attractive for consumers to become small scale load balancers, how will this get off the ground?

Jon Shepard

Thanks for the article. Arup is continually pushing the envelope and for such consistent effort, I'm grateful. There are a few points that got me excited about what Tesla is doing, and in conjunction with his cousin, Solar City as well. The first is that the basic outline of how to get houses - that desire to be off grid or 'green' enough to buy panels - who already have solar, to be self sufficient at night. The Power Wall battery does this to some extent. I'm assuming larger night consumers can just buy 2 or 3 if they really need more than 10kW from dusk to dawn. This is great.What triggered off in my mind right away, is that potentially the battery and electric car could optimize their overnight charging so as to minimize the need for grid power. Perhaps this could mean the car could charge in early sunlight, am not certain. But it's a worthy engineering and design challenge.The next is somewhat like Arup's author was alluding to, and that is running some kind of optimizing protocol in a little power controller/manager. This could indeed give meaningful output data in the form of charts and graphs to the home owner/users about their demand habits - in hopes of user change - which we all know is a tough psychology to motivate. But when it comes to trying to optimize demand and take in power during attractive rate offerings, not all states have access to sliding rate schemes - and so I'm not sure this is much of a big market opportunity.

I do think that people need education to build more steam for residential renewable/responsible/clean energy use. The upper classes and upper middle classes are ripe, but we all know that the sector of power users that will sway this effort (social engineering towards clean energy and freedom from fossil fuels?) are the ones who will probably never afford a $3000 battery for their garage or home wall.

Still, I have a huge desire to build a large engineering and customer service department at Tesla just to take this Solar/Battery/Electric car opportunity to the moon. We could build an easy platform for people's energy bills to be uploaded to a cloud computing and optimizing platform and analyse and size home systems to meet each consumer's needs. So cool the opportunities out there right now.

I can't wait to throw down 5k to get on the wait list for the new Tesla X and I'm getting a power wall too, once we pop our roof and get the solar. So pumped!

David Dawson

The technology is fascinating and will emerge strongly once the economics is 'right' for the householder. In Australia, while the early take-up of PV was very strong and cross-subsidised through various state government schemes (now at 1m+ installations, 4.17GW @ March 2015, Aust PV Inst), the reducing costs for installation and high household power bills mean the continued growth in distributed PV now seems to have a life of its own. The PV investment will continue to grow.

When distributed battery storage and intelligent household power usage control becomes affordable, the whole sector will get a further boost. The intelligent control also requires a 'smart meter' and access to cost based tariffs. But 'affordable' is the issue. Distributed storage within established grids will likely only progress further when the network owner and/or retailer provide the wholesale tariff 'bundles' which entice end-users to invest in the storage technology, and the storage technology becomes cheaper. This requires each of the network owner, retailer and end-user to share the benefit of 'free' sunlight derived energy 'fairly' amongst each other, while at the same time recognising that remaining connected to the grid brings benefits which must be paid for.

This will only occur as the businesses think through their long-term sustainable strategies and business models, and recognise the power of choice by the end-user, then offer tariffs which recognise different price points and different usage of the existing grid/generation infrastructure by the end-user.

Will such technology assist those less well off within the reach of current grids?

Unfortunately probably not, as the entry costs (even with shared 'free' energy from the sun) are simply not reachable for many families in our modern urban 'connected' environment. The main issue for the industry and policy makers, is then to ensure their decisions do not lead to the situation where such less well-off consumers attached to the grid end up paying higher tariffs than are justified.

So one amongst issues which must be addressed is that those end-users who can afford the investment in the PV/storage/control technology, need to recognise they also need to pay for the avoidable costs of remaining connected to the grid (there is after all a strong benefit from this). Network owners need to work out the avoidable costs, and offer tariffs based on these (I am not convinced they see the benefit of this for their business models yet). Retail businesses need to figure out how to share the benefits between the three parties involved in the transaction, so their remote generation assets continue to remain relevant in the long-term (maybe more renewable and/or environmentally friendly generation), and the grid (albeit unlikely to continue to need 'capacity' expansion) continues to be relevant.

Anyway, lots of issues, but welcome to the era of 'power of choice' for the energy consumer.

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